Windows Monitoring a parallel or LPT port

Question

Does anyone know a good library to allow us to programmatically monitor a parallel port (or LPT port) in windows. There are lots of good ones for Serial ports but I have had no luck yet for parallel ports. C# would be preferred but we're happy to do the Interop work if it's c / c++.

Thanks

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Feb 21 '11 at 15:04

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You need a driver that gives access to the parallel port. The inpout32.dll solution is nearly universally used. It also lets you pinvoke helper routines to execute the INP and OUT cpu instructions. Everything you'd ever want to know about parallel ports, including coding samples for inpout32 is assembled at Jan Axelson's home page.

answered Feb 21 '11 at 15:04

Hans Passant

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Thanks Hans - it looks like a good resource. I'll have look through there and see if there are any libraries to do what I want. – probably at the beach Feb 21 '11 at 16:47

score 1 · Answer 2 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:03

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Are you looking for something like this? How to find available parallel ports and their I/O addresses using Delphi and WMI its in Delphi, but I think you can find WMI in C# too.

edited May 23 '17 at 12:03

Community

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answered Feb 21 '11 at 12:29

Anuraj

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Thanks for you answer Anuraj - I'd need to read the data going to and from the port as well as simply enumerate the available ports. – probably at the beach Feb 21 '11 at 12:41

Windows Monitoring a parallel or LPT port

2 Answers2